THE ART OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 



reigning theories and cannot be fitted into the current body of 

 knowledge, they will not be acceptable. When discoveries are 

 made before their time they are almost certain to be ignored 

 or meet with opposition which is too strong to be overcome, 

 so in most instances they may as well not have been made. 

 Dr. Marjory Stephenson likens discoveries made in advance of 

 their time to long salients in warfare by which a position may 

 be captured. If, however, the main army is too far behind to 

 give necessary support, the advance post is lost and has to be 

 re-taken at a later date.*' 



McMunn discovered cytochrome in 1886, but it meant little 

 and was ignored until Keilin rediscovered it thirty-eight years 

 later and was able to interpret it. Mendel's discovery of the 

 basic principles of genetics is another good example of inability 

 of even the scientific world always to recognise the importance 

 of a discovery. His work established the foundation of a new 

 science, yet it was ignored for thirty-five years after it had been 

 read to a scientific .society and published. Fisher has said that each 

 generation seems to have found in Mendel's paper only what it 

 expected to find and ignored what did not conform to its own 

 expectations.^' His contemporaries saw only a repetition of 

 hybridisation experiments already published, the next generation 

 appreciated the importance of his views on inheritance but 

 considered them difficult to reconcile with evolution. And now 

 Fisher tells us that some of Mendel's results when examined in 

 the hard cold light of modern statistical methods show unmistak- 

 able evidence of being not entirely objective — of being biased in 

 favour of the expected result ! 



The work of some psychologists on extrasensory perception 

 and precognition may be a present-day example of a discovery 

 before its time. Most scientists have difficulty in accepting the 

 conclusions of these workers despite apparently irrefutable 

 evidence, because the conclusions cannot be reconciled with 

 present knowledge of the physical world. 



Unless made by someone outside accepted scientific circles, 

 discoveries made when the time is ripe for them are more 

 readily accepted because they fit into and find support in 

 prevailing concepts, or indeed, grow out of the present body 

 of knowledge. This type of discovery is bound to occur as part 



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